Atlanta Regional Commission
The Challenge
The Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) is the regional planning and intergovernmental coordination agency for the City of Atlanta, GA and surrounding 10-county area. ARC is dedicated to unifying the region’s collective resources to prepare the metropolitan area for continued prosperity. In order to accommodate their rapidly growing website requirements as they strive to meet their objectives, ARC required an interactive technology solution that could scale to their current and future needs.
The Objectives
When trying to accommodate new users, ARC would experience significant business pain due to the inflexible seat licensing options of their existing content management system, RedDot. With their number of content contributors continually increasing, ARC faced having to make a change in order to accommodate their growing needs. Additionally, new users reported dissatisfaction with RedDot’s administrative interface causing a constant point of contention among Site Administrators and an ever-present need for additional training.
In mapping out their needs for a new content management system, ARC identified the following objectives:
- Implement industry-leading search engine optimization capabilities that would help drive website traffic;
- Develop a dynamic, iterative and agile site that would be easy to maintain and update, and would interact seamlessly with existing ARC online tools;
- Provide role and permission-based workflow that would enable publishing flexibility and avoid bottlenecks.
- Provide a front and back-end that is intuitive, easy-to-use and requires no retraining.
The Solution
Bridgeline’s in depth experience developing sophisticated interactive websites and applications would prove instrumental to the success of the ARC project and help meet their ultimate goal: to develop and deploy a website that would provide ARC site visitors with a one-stop-shop for information that impacts the people and businesses of the Atlanta region.
The first step was implementing iAPPS Content Manager, Bridgeline’s powerful web content management solution. Once in place, ARC could then take full advantage of an advanced feature set that they found to be lacking in their previous platform.
Bridgeline developers next undertook the task of developing a seamless, back-end integration to ARC’s existing online tools including a GIS (Geographic Information System) Map, which allows site visitors to view and query geographic data or create customized maps. Bridgeline’s use of a sophisticated .NET platform ensures that the ARC site can scale easily to include any other potentially interactive online tools in the future.
The Results
ARC’s new website accommodates their increasing number of content contributors with ease. Thanks to the flexible licensing of iAPPS, ARC has no limitations on adding seats for new content editors in the future. Furthermore, by selecting a SaaS (Software as a Service) licensing option, Bridgeline provides the ongoing managed services for ARC in its state-of-the-art hosting environment. Julie Ralston, Communications Director for ARC, adds “The option of the SaaS environment enabled us to stay within our project parameters and keeps us from having to worry about product updates and site security; Bridgeline handles all of that.”
Additionally, by moving to iAPPS Content Manager, the costly headache of retraining users is eliminated. ARC Site Administrators now enjoy the advantages of the extremely intuitive and easy-to-use administrative interface pervasive throughout the iAPPS Product Suite.
The end result for ARC is a dynamic, iterative, and agile site that is easy to interact with and maximizes their online interactive technologies while providing visitors with a one-stop shop for all of their informational needs.